I have always wondered what comes after TB. But here you are using the term 27000PB. So what comes after PB so that we can all breath easy and write 27XX?I like the term bille-yons. Is this an obfuscation technique that I'm not aware of?

After Petabyte (Pb) comes an Exabyte (Eb), followed by a Zettabyte (Zb). Wikipedia does a good explanation, as always.

Regarding the editorial, it's an interesting subject, and lots of companies will find their own answer. What interests me most, though, is the aspect of backing all this data up, because backup technology (or more precisely that related to backup speed) doesn't always seem to keep pace with hard disc storage capabilities.

Actually the editorial has a point. Part of my job is making sure that our network drive space doesn't get overwhelmed by the project infomation and other files not stored in databases. The content creators and users often don't clean up after themseves. Call it resource management or file dictatorship, it's needed in many situations.

My favorite storage issues is that of backup space and performance. The group that is responsible for configuring and selling hardware to our customers is notorius for neglecting to acknowledge that they need to look at the current backup hardware to identify if they can still back up the data that the new hardware will store. There is nothing better than seeing the reaction of a customer when they hit the wall of backing up 4TB to a single LTO1 table drive. Hmmm... someone messed up that one.

In the age of SAN and NAS storage Tape is quickly becoming a problem media both from a time to backup as well as a time to recover standpoint. Disk based backup for the primary is probably going to be the only option for a while. I am still however a firm believer in true backups and not replication as there is no better way to loose data than to replicate a delete.

It amazes me how many people do not understand that replication is not a backup

This is the comment that seems to arrise from the mouths of all kinds. I've heard business managers, IT managers, developers and even administrators use this statement, and I think its misleading. 1TB in a notebook is not the same kind of storage as 1TB on the network. That's like saying that cars are cheap. I can go buy a new Saturn Ion for about $13,000, but you're not going to see me out at the local track with it.

The total cost of storage includes redundancy, data retention, and performance costs. These prices are coming down, but at an even lower rate than the 1TB of storage you'd purchase at Best Buy. I disagree with Steve, as it is the job of the storage administrators to push on end users to take ownership of their data as they are the only ones that can make a good decision as to what to keep and what not to keep. The storage administrator is merely trying to impress upon the user to keep their hard drives clean and organized just as a manager would impress upon them to clean up their cubicals!

The quoted article seems to have a way low estimate: 27 exabyte (27,000 PB) in terms of disk drives isn't that many. Considering that 1TB drives are now rather inexpensive (and even not all that surprising connected to a notebook, as Steve mentions), achieving 27 exabyte only requires 27 million 1TB drives. At $300 per drive, that's only $7.5 billion sales across Seagate, WD, Hitachi et al. (Using more, cheaper, and cheaper-per-byte, smaller drives reduces this number even more -- though smaller faster drives for transaction processing use would raise it.) And $8 billion or so is a tiny fraction of the total private sector IT spend (aggregate of approximately $1 trillion currently).....

What the survey likely fails to consider is that as the cost of storage (gross cost, including drives, ports, footprint, power, people, etc) continues to plummet, the application for it will increase: few organizations stored video/audio in the past, but today many/most do, etc....

Anyway, on a simple back of the envelope basis, seems to me that this estimate is low by a factor of hundreds or thousands!

Michael Ross (1/16/2008)...I disagree with Steve, as it is the job of the storage administrators to push on end users to take ownership of their data....

I agree with you (i.e. disagreeing with Steve), but only as regards the users in my current company with respect to the way we currently do business. Where I agree with Steve is that in a different company with different users, doing business according to a different model, it may well be appropriate to tell storage admins to just deal with it. This is precisely one of those areas that demonstrate there is no one right answer.

The storage administrator is merely trying to impress upon the user to keep their hard drives clean and organized just as a manager would impress upon them to clean up their cubicals!

Not necessarily the best analogy; my desk's an absolute disgrace (precisely because I'm too busy working to spend time on tidying....) Ho, hum.